I couldn't agree more about the junk, Allyx! I try to eat only a small amount of processed or convenience foods (except cheese!) and stick to fresh wherever possible. I don't mind the occasional ready meal, but I always read the labels.
Whether or not we have totally evolved to eat some foods is an interesting discussion. As hunter-gatherers in the palaeolithic and mesolithic we would have eaten everything in season, but those are the key words - in season! There is evidence across Europe, even here in North Yorkshire, that groups of people moved around from the uplands to the sea-shore and back again, certainly collecting workable flint and presumably eating fish and other sea-food when they were at the coast. There are enormous mesolithic shell-middens on the Scottish islands - thousands and thousands of whelks and cockles and mussels. It must have got boring! But they also contain fish bones and even seal bones.
I don't think, with a very few exceptions, that we've ever lived entirely on protein and fat. We are designed as omnivores, though our atrophied appendixes indicate we're not meant to eat vast amounts of plant cellulose.The hunter-gatherers would have gone for meat whenever possible, because of its high nutritional value, and because of all the other things they could do eg with skins, bones and sinew. They'd eat fruit, nuts and seeds, wild veg and tubers, small game and wildfowl, with the bigger animals when they could get them. The 'gathering' would probably be more reliable for regular food than the big-game hunting!
There's evidence in Europe of paleolithic people driving herds of horses and other animals over cliffs (eg at Boxgrove in England) and then picking out the best bits! and one group of people on the steppes who built their winter shelters (big ones!) out of mammoth bones. Fat would have been very valuable because of its high calorie content, and animal fat (which contains mono- and some poly-unsaturated fats as well as saturated) stores well, and can be used to make highly nutritious and long-lasting food eg the pemmican of the North American native peoples. The Eskimo and Sami (Lapps) were living this sort of life until very recently, with much less carbohydrate than is available in the more 'temperate' zones like the UK.
They would store by drying, salting and smoking, - and freezing, in winter - and probably be very lean and under-nourished by the end of the winter - bearing in mind that in Northern Europe much of this was going on during inter-glacial periods in the last Ice Age. They seem to have lived well, on the whole, and had time for some art work eg carvings and cave paintings, whatever function those really fulfilled.
We don't know enough about their age at death - we don't have enough skeletons to do valid statistics on. It's likely that they did die 'young' - but then again, so did most modern humans 150 years ago, except for the privileged classes! Hunter-gatherers would have had accidents, women would have borne children very frequently which must have worn them down, and diseases and infections must have been very dangerous. All that could have been said about the working-classes in 19th century London; on the whole I think the Palaeolithic peoples lived better than them. But there was one 'old' man buried with some care at the Shanidar Cave in Anatolia (I think!), who was badly crippled but had none-the-less survived. He was neanderthal , I seem to remember, rather than a modern human.
Primitive agriculture was started by moden humans in the Near East about 12,000 years ago, using emmer, einkorn and 6-row barley, and this starts appearing in the UK about 7,000 - 8,000 years ago, if I remember rightly. Dairy farming comes in a little bit later. It's not taken long for plant breeding to get us to where we are now, in terms of crops. I'm not sure when rice was first farmed in Asia, but I think about the same time ago.
Vegetable oils came in in the Bronze Age, maybe 5000 years ago, again in the Near East and Greece with the first olive presses. Previous to that, our fats were almost entirely of animal origin.
There is some evidence, however, that we had alcohol about 40,000 years ago, in the Balkans. Wild grapes!
Whether we could have evolved and adapted to go healthily from the hunter-gatherer diet to the cereal-based diet is a question for geneticists, not for me. All I know is that a high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet got me to 18 stone, and that the opposite takes weight off me, gives me more energy, and is very good for my blood pressure and lipid profiles. But that's just me!
I totally agree that we certainly can't sustain an animal-protein-based diet for 8 billion people. I would like to see us going to quality cereal and veg production, with a very minimum of chemicals, on suitable agricultural land world-wide, with stock-breeding on (eg) the uplands such as here in the Dales, where controlled stock numbers preserve the landscape and the peat bogs, and help manage both the ecology and the leisure resource. This land isn't suitable for arable cultivation, but it can contribute.
What I really don't like is importing baby veg, green beans and cut flowers from Africa, where I think they should focus their resources on feeding their own populations. All this 'trade' is doing is exporting their water and soil goodness to our supermarkets! I know there are 'economic' reasons for encouraging this trade, but it doesn't seem common-sense to me. But what do I know? :lol:
We should be helping those countries to improve their infrastructure so that they can get their own produce safely to market. Someone was saying on the World Service the other night, that at least one-third of some 'third world' agricultural production rots before it can be got to the local markets.
Common sense? We need to get a grip of the planet's food and water resources before we really start having food riots and water wars.
Anyway - rant over! I do go on, as I keep saying. But it's an interesting subject.
Viv
